Over the years, smart home technology has been adopted by many users for reasons such as ease of use, monitor, control, security, and energy efficiency. In recent years, the awareness and popularity of the smart homes is increasing multifold. Due to the popularization of the smart homes, it is being tightly coupled with the concept of ‘Internet of Things’ (IoT). The ever growing popularity of the smart home technology eventually leads to heavy deployment of wireless devices at homes. The deployed wireless devices include different classes of devices which can be categorized based on their availability, durability, and service provided by the devices. All the devices are categorized mainly into resource rich devices (i.e., non-constrained devices) and resource constrained devices.
In existing systems, the constrained devices run all of their services and waits for any external service requests from other external devices such as the non-constrained devices. The constrained devices are forced to keep their radios turned “ON” always to make their presence available for other external devices thus, reducing the battery life of the constrained devices. Further, the constrained devices are forced to retransmit due to congestion in the home network. In order to avoid overhead involved in maintaining state, most of the constrained devices operate in a lossy or constrained networks. Also, in order to save life of their batteries most of the constrained devices employ push based mechanism to pull. In an example, the external device (i.e., client) which needs the service, expected to subscribe for the interested service on the constrained device. The constrained device will notify upon change in its information back to the client.
Further, while notifying the change in the information there are chances that the notification might get lost due to the lossy nature of the constrained networks or due to congestion in the lossy networks. Thus, the constrained device ends up in re-transmitting the notification until it receives an acknowledgement from the non-constrained device; thus, resulting in large and unnecessary wastage of the battery power. The amount of battery power wastage is directly proportional to the congestion of the network, number of retrials before declaring the failure, number of subscribers of the state, and the availability of the subscribers in the network.
Thus, there is a need in the art for a simple and robust method to form an association between a non-constrained device and a constrained device in a heterogeneous network; thereby, saving energy consumption and extending battery life of the constrained device.
The above information is presented as background information only to help the reader to understand the present invention. Applicants have made no determination and make no assertion as to whether any of the above might be applicable as Prior Art with regard to the present application.